CHRIS RASCHKA

In order to talk about
how I create picture books, I need to tell you about my audience. My audience
is children. First of all, I consider them to be very much the same as adults.
Which is to say that I consider myself to be very much the same now, and some
things are harder. Talking to strangers is a little bit easier today. The
entire month of August has improved since I was eight. On the other hand,
learning another language is a lot harder now. And I ran much more as a child
than I do today, which is too bad. However, I don't feel that the me of thirty years ago is much different from the me of
today. I don't recall any single moment of the great change, or many little
steps. I just remember a long, gooey flow from the beginnings of my
self-awareness to now. This view of my childhood definitely influences my work.

Usually a number of
events will be going on around me to start me on a book. What I mean is, I will
have read a poem or seem a picture that is lingering in my mind. I will be
brooding about something going on in my life, and then Iw ill remember something
that happened to me as a child. Some of this will just come to me; some of it I
will actively pursue-for instance, maybe what it was that worried me the most
when I was eight. So then I will have this thing I want to get down. It might
be just a single picture in my mind, or an image suggested by a line of poetry,
or a turn of phrase I heard in the street, something that I want to nurse along
into a picture book.

No I have to wait: I
have to wait for the structure. What I mean is that these ideas coming together
need to find a form. Part of the form is already given: it will be thirty-two
pages. Whatever I'm thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the
standard picture book size. So that's something. But the structure and the form
for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as
words and images will the content of the work. Sometimes I'll have to wait for
this part for a long time. Often I will follow the wrong path for months and
then have to discard what I have done. Sometimes it takes getting to know the
book better. Sometimes the structure comes to me intact almost at once.

Somewhere in this
process, I begin reading and showing my book to my audience. When I say my
audience I mean a single imaginary child who is a blend of myself as a young
person, the students in my wife's classroom of first- through third-graders,
and the students from two classrooms I visit regularly in the Bronx, New York.
I think about reading the book to this imaginary child, or this imaginary
classroom, and I try to see what their reaction is. Finally, I will actually
read a dummy of the book to some of these children, or better yet, I will have
the book read to them by someone else, who will take notes for me. And then I
make some changes.